M. Delaunay, rôle de Fortunio, dans "le chandelier"

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986

Accession Number:

1986.1073

Not on view

Within about a decade, the daguerreotype gave way in France to the process invented by the Englishman Henry Talbot which allowed multiple positive prints on paper to be made from a single negative--the procedural basis of nearly all photography since. A painter and lithographer, Vallou is reported to have made daguerreotypes beginning around 1842, but it is only his salted paper prints made in the early 1850s that have survived or been identified as his. In addition to a large series of nudes and draped figures intended as artist's aids, Vallou produced a group of photographic portraits of actors from the Comédie Française in various roles.